Introducing SQL Direct 12​.0

SQL Direct enables you to access the DESIGN Database directly from within software products that support Microsoft Universal Data Access interfaces such as ODBC, OLE DB and ADO.

Products that support these interfaces include the Microsoft Office applications Word, Excel and Access, other proprietary databases such as ORACLE and SYBASE, end-user applications written in Visual Basic and Visual C++, and of course SQL Direct. We collectively refer to these products as data consumers or data providers, according to whether they consume or provide data access services (irrespective of whether data is read from or written to any particular database). Some products can act both as consumers and providers.

Using SQL Direct tools, you can query any data that the DESIGN module can access i.e. attributes, pseudo-attributes, and UDAs.

The following diagram gives an overview of the software components that make up SQL Direct (shown in pale blue) in relation to data consumer applications and PDMS.

Although not necessary to access data through OLE DB and ADO, you can enhance SQL Direct using Microsoft SQL Server (or Microsoft SQL Desktop Engine (MSDE), which is an equivalent but earlier product).

SQL Server provides access to additional functionality by acting as a data consumer and then providing a relational view of the data to other applications, for example Microsoft Access, through its "linked server" facility. This mode of data access can be further wrapped as an ODBC data source.

We have tested SQL Direct with MSDE 2000, Service Pack 4. However, throughout the rest of this document we will refer to Microsoft SQL Server, or simply SQL Server.